


And That Is Eternity

by heartstone



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, M/M, Romance, Self-Harm, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-12-01 00:04:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11474436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartstone/pseuds/heartstone
Summary: He laid there limply, cushioned in the fleecy snow lined with a bed of evergreen leaves that had fallen from the tree looming above him, branches heavy and prickling as they protectively covered him under a heady skirt of pine. Their glossy needles swung in the breeze, a sheen of glaucous green and a soft spray of fine snow like sand that blew up from surface of a hillock behind him, over his huddled form so close to the rough trunk.***Melkor is lost to Mairon in the Void.





	And That Is Eternity

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity.

(Quote by Edvard Munch)

***

He laid there limply, cushioned in the fleecy snow lined with a bed of evergreen leaves that had fallen from the tree looming above him, branches heavy and prickling as they protectively covered him under a heady skirt of pine. Their glossy needles swung in the breeze, a sheen of glaucous green and a soft spray of fine snow like sand that blew up from surface of a hillock behind him, over his huddled form so close to the rough trunk.

The figure spasmed under the thin branches, a tremor not from cold. Eyes glassy and dull with the throbbing siphon of pain, the blurriness of Mairon’s eyes steamed off of his hot flesh in thin smoky tendrils, muscles twitching and mouth moving in a breathless attempt at controlling the shooting pain that fevered his body. Slim hands shook as they uncovered the wound that sent hot spurts of thick blood spattering across the pure snow, making it deluge a red so dark it was nearly black, making its burgundy sully the unbroken cleanliness of the snow.

The wound would have been fatal on any other, but Mairon was not mortal, and as he convulsed slightly, forcing his body to puppet to his spirit, he was able to set aside the physical discomfort enough to send a pulse through his Fána, molten waves of liquid fire from his very core to mend the broken flesh and stitch the chipped bone, to cauterize with his soul’s magma and cool the subterranean heat into an obsidian scab, covering the once-exposed viscera and softening into tawny velvet flesh as if it had never before been split by some lucky arrow-shot.

No, it was not difficult for him to ignore the searing pain of steel cleaving his gut, scraping past ribs and lodging itself in his spine. The feeling of an arrow-head channeling into his marrow and passing by organs that he did not use was not so much pain as a sensation welcoming for its distraction. But now the gash was mended and left only a residual ache, and the spattering fountain of garnet ceased.

A single breath. Two. All was stilled around him, the wind stopped kissing the crest of the snowy dunes, the needles stopped falling and glinting in the newborn sun, and the fragrance of pine held in the unmoving air, thick and suffocating. All of Arda held its breath.

_He had failed._ Ribbons of soreness seared not from his Fána, but scintillated from somewhere deep within the abyssal inferno of his soul, bursting forth like the clawing fingers of a star’s rays in blinding white-hotness against the sea of pitch black void that shaded his thoughts. Such heat even he could not match with his Fëa, a heat that was the bursting of a celestial body in a violent collapsing of matter. It settled like lead dregs into his chest in a vomitous coil, pressed firmly into the back of his skull and wormed its way into each and every one of his exhausted tissues. The ribbons thinned into fine lines, nerves that screamed and writhed under his skin and burst from the pressure of boiling blood in his vessels until he was all mottled and bruised and forced to curl up within himself in unbelievable dense pain.

He failed he failed he failed he failed he failed. He chanted it over and over, an unstoppable line of words not yet leaving his bruised lips, sealed in whimpering pain, his tongue crushed under sharp teeth that ground his jaws and his fingernails rending the firm muscle in his arms, digging into the hard contracting meat of muscle almost to peel it from bone, to rip shreds of skin from himself in pulsing crimson.

His vision blackened with hazy spots, despite the sea of contrasting, brilliant colour. They taunted him, sent forced waves of thick nausea down his throat into his lungs, drowning. He trembled and his Fëa writhed and his music was halted, tempo disturbed in favor of a single shrill screech of nay flute and violin and soprano that split his skull at the temples. The blood that had fallen into the snow steamed and hissed with its dying heat, burning through the snowflakes. They imprinted in his vision even when he fully blanked out, when all he could discern was red that was black, the ichor that had pooled like a lazy tide from his Master’s Hröa.

Mairon saw it now with his own eyes, that he had shared the pain Melkor had felt as bone was splintered and silvery flesh sliced and punctured, as his Master screamed in the depths of Angband like a mortal: that He felt every nerve severed like Arda’s carnal inhabitants. Every slice of Eönwë’s divine weapon as it shattered His ankles to prevent Melkor’s fleeing- fleeing that would never have happened- all of it echoed back to Mairon; the sight of haematic red, the smell of metal and ill heat. The pain. Mairon curled tighter under the tree as pulse-waves clashed into him like the angry foam of Ulmo’s wine-dark sea on jagged granite, like elf meat in the Red Maw of Carcharoth. The silence was pregnant with the potential of a shrill scream that came both from his suffering and part from the Mighty Arising.

He clawed and tore at his exposed flesh, blindly raked at the snow, mixed pink beneath him and broke his nails on the thick bark of the pine’s trunk. Tears streaked his face like flares of Anor in the sky, collected in the snow and burned tunnels as they were pulled to the earth.

_“Thou must leave,_ He had told him, _“Leave now, as thy Master wills it.”_ He spoke it into his pointed ear, His face pressed near enough to feel the cold breath ghost the shell of his ear like the arctic halitus. Valinor had emptied, and his Master reclined on His throne, regal and menacing with all the powers of Thangorodrim, fallen. His broad shoulders stooped and His frown cut deep into His visage not in the twist of anger, but in a distortion of sorrow. Mairon could sense the enemy drawing near, approaching swiftly.

Fear bubbled in his blood, breeding panic. His Fëa leaped, skipped parts of the music like a startled stag. He grabbed onto Melkor’s arm, tugged harshly at the blackened iron rerebrace to avoid harming his Master’s hands at the gauntlet. So out of his mind with fright was Mairon that he did not hear Melkor’s orders, the words that fell from His lips like stones in sea. His ears were deaf to all but the pounding of footfalls outside the chamber, to the pummeling of the Elves and Men and Maiar on the great doors. And so he stood there, nearly ablaze with fear and frustration and-- _why wasn’t Melkor moving!?_

He whipped back around to Melkor, a dull roar behind him through the thick stone that separated them from the wrath of the Valar, the proximity of harps and orchestras and heavenly choirs, each note like arrow shafts into his chest, and Melkor looked up at him from His throne and Mairon looked down and he knew, _he knew_ what his Master was thinking with one glance, with the small change of tincture in His eyes that were now a foggy blue colour, the unnatural shade of icy blindness. The damn Silmarils smirked triumphantly at Mairon in the darkness, matched the light of his brother outside of the doors as they ordered for a battering ram. _Why wouldn’t he move?_

Fingers caressed his face, a soft, barely-there whisper; a mere suggestion of touch than any real pressure. Melkor had removed one of His gauntlets, caressed his cheek with the pads of His charcoaled fingertips, streaked sable and the sangria of his blood or the blood of slain Children. He smiled more serene than Mairon had seen Him in millennium: since the beginning days of their companionship. It made crinkles around His unseeing eyes like the furrows of earth, created brackets arounds His thin lips, sparkling with sharp, white teeth. It made Him look unburdened, like His iron crown was removed.

_“Dost thou remember,”_ Melkor whispered, breaking Mairon’s thoughts. The clanging outside faded to nothing, nothing but His voice, and His touch, and His scent, and His face; framed with inky shadows and crowned with light that was the glory of the gods. _“Dost thou remember what I hath told thee, not so very long ago, when thou wast attacked by Huan?”_

Mairon nodded fervently, anything to get Him to move. There was nothing. Nothing but Discord and the redolence of rain on earth and nothing but the three thin lines of scar tissue across Melkor’s visage. _“I remember,”_ he whispered back, a susurration from his Fëa. Melkor chuckled, rich and dark and intense, and His lids collected, nearly brimmed over with what surely could not be what Mairon thought.

“ _That thou art worth more to me than any gem, than any of Arda’s cheap trinkets or Fëanor’s stones. That thou art my Precious, and I could not bear it, to witness as thou meet thy ruin by mine own folly.”_

Of the tears that brimmed His lids, two fell, and one hung onto His long dark lashes like it did not want to part from Him. Mairon began to shake his head slowly in dissent, tugging again on the armour uselessly. No. No no no no no. He knew his Master’s design, knew the music of His Fëa.

_“Thou must leave. They wilt not stop until I am ensnared. They wilt not search for thee ever-long, my Little Flame. Thou wilt survive for me, carry on for thine Master, and I shall be much eased--”_ His voice broke, a strain in His cords, and His cheeks held rivulets. _“--Eased to know that thou art safe.”_

Mairon shook his head once more, furiously pulling all his weight on his Master, nearly toppling them from the side of the carven throne. But Melkor was stronger, and stubborn as always, and He laughed only to quell emotion He didn’t know He had. Mairon screamed at Him, yelled at Him, kicked and punched and hollered for Him to move fruitlessly and Melkor endured the assault, drew him onto the throne with Him, cradling him in His lap.

_“They wilt not let thee sit in Mandos!”_ Mairon bellowed, _“Thy punishment wilt be banishment, severed from all of Arda in the endless Void!”_

His muscles twitched, he could feel his brother Eönwë close, could feel the prickling light of rising hope on the other side of Angband’s great doors as the battering ram was reeled steadily back. Melkor smiled sadly, tucked a strand of copper hair behind a jeweled point, pressed His lips on the bridge of his nose. Melkor’s Fëa surged, and He pushed the fiery tendrils of His Maia’s aura, terror-struck, sent them from Him and back to their origin. Though they could never truly be separated- so bound were they- the threads and beads of gold could be loosened, could be prepared. Mairon twisted against Him, lashed to stop Him from untying their connection, fell limply in useless abandon.

_“Dost thou remember also, that I spoke to thee how I spread mine Fëa across all of Arda in the Beginning of Time, how I shared my might with all the earth in it tumultuous conception, with the soil and the liquid stone beneath its crust, the rocks and the streams, the mountains and valleys, and even the air, or Yavanna’s life made of the clay of earth? Dost thou remember?”_

Mairon nodded, plucking from his memory how He showed him how He had put a piece of Himself in all matter, how He incarnated Himself permanently in every atom, in even the smallest invisible particles that composed Arda.

_“I wilt not leave thee, never truly, Little Flame. For I am in all things, and my Discord is in the music of the wind when it carries with it a thousand flakes of snow, in the droplets of rain that dews the grass or floods the plains, in the fine grains of sand as they shift under thy feet, or even the buds that push forth from the soil in Tuilë. I am in all things, and--”_

Mairon began to shake as Melkor pushed him from the throne, His Fëa pulling back into His Hröa, as Melkor began to guide him to a secret passage behind a tapestry, as He let His blackened fingers weave into his copper hair, as He looked over him a final time and released the part of Mairon’s Fëa that allowed Melkor to see despite His blindness. And to Melkor the world plunged into darkness and Mairon’s face blurred and faded and He could see naught but the golden radiance that was his true form, now dimmed. The tear that had clung so desperately to His lashes fell.

_“--And thou wilt draw sustenance from Arda when we art sundered, thou wilt survive without a Vala. Thou must,”_ He whispered, _“For thou art most precious to me.”_

And the grand stone doors that was the final bulwark guarding them broke and overflowed Angband with a glorious light, and Manwë’s trumpets sounded and the Followers gave their battle-cries and the Firstborn notched their bows in solemn anticipation and Mairon heard nothing, saw nothing but the last imprint of Melkor’s face and His baritone voice deep as thunder as he fled from Angband. He fled until his legs could no longer carry him, until he was blinded from tears, whipped by passing trees, shot by arrows and tripped at the ghost feeling of a holy blade cleaving his feet from his legs, falling down a bank under the branches of a pine tree deep into the forest that thrived on the Iron Mountains.

And he laid there now, rocking into the snow until he melted it down to the hard permafrost, until his nails like barbs stuck into his flesh and his bones quaked with agony, his Fëa radiating with a pain that threatened to infall the mantle of his Fána, his soul halting and only wishing to fling outwards this mortal form with a dense flux of emotion. It made him pummel at the bark and the pine needles, the snow and the dirt and his flesh until suddenly, from deep within him, the last thread of Mairon’s Fëa that had thinned and stretched and _strained_ to be pulled taut so far from Angband to Valinor, until this last simmering cord of gold snapped and he knew at once that Melkor had been thrown past the Door of the Night and was cast deep into the unreachable Void.

It felt as if chunks of him were torn from his abdomen, like a warhammer spike between his eyes or a parasite deep in his chest, eating him away with corrosive alkalis. For the first time since he fell down the snow-dune he screamed, a harrowing, curdling scream more terrible than his wolves at dead of midnight, piercing the fabric of Arda nestled snugly in a pocket of space. He was emptied, frayed, writhing around him in golden flame was his Fëa, dimming and fading only into buttermilk yellows, absent of the vibrant cardinals and cinnabar: like embers, fading.

Never had he truly been alone, never completely torn apart. Even in the three ages he had been kept from Melkor he could still feel his Master’s reassurances and the small shadows that slipped by unnoticed from the Halls of Mandos. No matter where he had been he could always turn to his Master’s Discord, to the shade that hung by Mairon like he was a magnet repelling light. Maiar spirits often withered, faded like the Firstborn when they did not have a Vala to claim them. When he had left Aulë, Melkor had been there to ease the pain of severing His ties, to smooth over the severing of some phantasmic umbilical cord by immediately rejoining.

But He was gone, he had failed to protect Him and his hands left their bloodied mess at his arms or the sullied pink snow and tore at his hair as he spasmed under the branches, screamed in torment as his Fëa desperately looked for something to latch onto, as he could no longer find that which he took power and nourishment from. Searching; searching but never finding, struggling to contain himself in his Fána.

He burned, burned, burned. Memories of the screams of Melkor far-off when He was captured, the sounds of Manwë’s decree: could hear the chains of Angainor clank, the clamp of Vorotemnar the too-cold manacles around His wrists, and Ilterindi, the fetters that were left behind, unneeded. The hammering of the iron crown into an iron collar was like a stake driven through his head, the creaking of a door, large and ominous. . .

\--But there! Softly!

He could hear it _now,_ not _then!_ Snow had begun to fall, drifting down from the sky in a twinkling haze. Mairon’s voice, long screamed raw until all that was left were his rent vocal cords and a wrenching gasp. The ice crystals fell and Mairon’s vision restored, and he watched under the shadows of the tree the frozen fractals.

\--There! Again! It sounded like the beginning of Discord, the first notes of His never-ending tune. Each flake that fell sounded like the strumming of a harp. Tears fell on his brown flesh, blood fell now like a mere trickle and his pain became a low, dull pulse of bass. He listened, ears straining, bruised eyes burning at the sacred whiteness of snow. He watched it fall blankly, listened to the melody build, looking down at the geometric shape of a single flake in the bloody dirt, remembered that Melkor made each and every one unique, that He made the clouds also from which the flakes were born.

Ears pricked, drums sounded from the tectonic plates as they moved languorously, shifting the earth. The magma deep beneath was the humming of a choir, the lightning in the distance were cymbals, thunder was brass, the tree-needles a plucking of viols and the water in its trunk was the tinkling of a flute. Music was in the thick patches of saxifrage, cellos in the creeping labrador tea, the vibrant flowering lavender of pasque were instruments yet to be made. All around him, Mairon paused, listened to Arda, to his Master.

The mountains in the distance echoed with Melkor’s low voice, the clouds in the sky were the same ivory shade His skin had been, purpled with dawn. The rivers and banks that enwreathed the earth were His veins, the molten rock His blood. Earthquakes that fissured or were too small to feel were His Fëa-pulse, the shadows on the countryside His jet eyes, the jewels of the Earth and all the small elements were His, and they vibrated with His song.

Mairon sobbed softly, pressing his face into the soil below him, mud from his heat and tear-fall and blood, and felt the granules of fine-ground rock, the soft decay of plant matter, and other such sediment sung with small, but insistent voices the Discord of Melkor. The pain radiated and burned and blinded, but he was not alone, and his Fëa found purchase on the earth, let his golden spirit sink into Arda, into its very makeup to join with his Master once more. Mairon’s voice did not return, but his lips moved and sung along with the movement of electrons, commanded the Discord and guided matter to order, just as he had done afore Eru with Melkor in the Beginning; just as he would always be wont to do.

Cradled in the crimson-stained soil under the waving boughs of a pine tree, snowflakes brushed by his cheek in comfort and felt as Melkor’s fingers had felt, caressing him, soothing him in the end. And Mairon trembled, eyes closing gently with a flutter, body relinquishing its tension as he was lulled to a deep slumber by the ancient, undying voice of Melkor: that which lived on forever in all, tainting all things with sheltering shadow and guiding all things towards an unstoppable entropy.

**Author's Note:**

> Why do I do this to myself? *Sobs* It's nothing that the two of them don't deserve, but still. . .  
> My main thoughts in making this was a quote by J. R. R. Tolkien that Melkor is literally incarnate in Arda, that Arda is, essentially, Melkor's "One Ring," and that instead of concentrating himself in a small object like Mairon later does, he spreads himself in all the matter of earth. I thought this would be a good way to approach Mairon having to deal without Melkor.  
> Finally (if you really squint), I have a bit in there that Eönwë is Mairon's younger brother, mimicking the dynamic between Melkor and Manwë a bit.  
> I'd love to know what you think! :)  
> ***


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